Increasing the productivity of your sales team

A productive sales team is key when it comes to increasing sales revenue and the overall growth of a business. As someone who is currently in a leadership position, it’s your responsibility to make sure your sales team is selling at a productive rate. 

Even if you think your sales team is at their very best, they need to continue developing their skills to stay ahead of the game in the long run. Because of this, we’ve put together a number of points which will help you to increase your sales team’s productivity.  

Determine your ideal client

For your sales team to become more productive, you need to help them become more efficient in the way they work. You can do this by outlining the typical customer profile of your target audience. It might be a certain demographic, or maybe even people who operate in a specific industry. Either way, it should be customers who are most likely to be interested in your business.  

This doesn’t mean you can’t target people who don’t fit your typical customer profile, but it should be an area where you’re looking to extract the most value from. By selling to people who match your customer profile, your sales team can concentrate on generating quality leads which are more likely to convert into sales and increase your company’s revenue.

Establish an effective sales process

Another way of ensuring a productive sales team is by implementing an effective sales process. This should be easy to follow and can consist of anywhere from five to seven steps. A sales process includes a series of repeatable steps that will take your sales team right the way through initialising contact with potential clients, to later finalising deals. 

Once your sales team has been through the routine enough times, they will begin to feel more comfortable with the sales process. As a sales process can be the difference between a struggling sales team and a productive one, it’s important that you evaluate your process at regular intervals to measure its effectiveness.

Increase diversity 

It’s no secret that diversity leads to more positive results for businesses. Diversity doesn’t just consider someone’s ethnicity, it counts towards a whole range of factors including age, gender, religion, background and characteristics. In the sales arena, diversity is equally as beneficial and can massively influence the success of your business. 

If your sales team consists of people from similar walks of life then you might struggle to connect with parts of your customer base. However, hiring people from different backgrounds will give you a variety of perspectives, which will give you a far better chance of connecting with a wider range of demographics. This will give you more scope as a business, allowing you to decipher the differences between various cultures and gain an understanding of the needs of different people. As a result, productivity will increase and your sales team will be able to make more sales. 

Onboard the right sales talent

Similarly to ensuring you have the right level of diversity within your sales team, onboarding the right sales talent is essential when it comes to increasing the productivity of your sales team. Determining who to recruit for your sales team is so much more than simply choosing the most experienced candidate. It’s about hiring the salespeople who are most suited to your company culture. 

A winning culture is one of the crucial factors in determining the success of your sales team. Of course, the salespeople themselves are essential in building and then maintaining this culture. So, it's important to hire salespeople who have personalities that are conducive to this bigger picture, as it's probably the best course of action in building an increasingly productive environment. By prioritising this approach, you are likely to find that the collective results of a high performing sales team will go further than what one experienced salesperson could do on their own.

Set goals 

As a way of further ensuring sales productivity, you should be aiming to have regular meetings with your sales team. Here, you can establish an effective communication path with each of them. These meetings present you with an opportunity to gain an understanding of their unique personalities and their primary sources of motivation. 

From these discussions, you’ll probably find that a large percentage of your sales team are naturally ambitious. However, sometimes it can be helpful to have challenging, yet attainable goals in place to keep them focused and boost productivity. As a way of measuring productivity, you can then see if each of your salespeople reaches their goals. In the instance that your sales reps meet their goals, it’s important to celebrate their achievements, before moving on to the next set of sales goals. Then again, if your salespeople fail to meet their goals, there will be enough evidence for you to come together and find ways in which you can help them improve their performance. This will ensure that your salespeople remain engaged, which will help you to increase the overall productivity of your sales team. 

Provide sales training 

Remember, in order to become more productive as individuals, your salespeople need to feel confident in their knowledge, skills and general ability to carry out their job responsibilities to a high standard. That’s why the ultimate way of guaranteeing an increasingly productive sales team is to provide them with consistent sales training. With ongoing training, your sales team will learn about the latest selling techniques, which they can practise by applying to their everyday roles straightaway. If each of your salespeople take advantage of the self-development opportunities and continue to see gradual progress, the productivity of your sales team will come on leaps and bounds.

In addition to improving the all-round ability of your sales team, training can play a major role in attracting and retaining ambitious sales reps. If you want to be on the receiving end of  quality sales training, then you’ve come to the right place. Here at Pareto, we offer a range of sales training courses, so your sales team can improve their skills and continue to perform to the best of their ability.